As the Internet keeps growing, so does the number of registered domain names. It makes sense, of course. The number of sites grows, so we need more addresses.
We recently mentioned that we are likely to pass 100 million registered domain names across all country-code top level domains this year (ccTLDs, e.g. .de, .cn, .uk, etc.).
A respectable number, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
.com in a league of its own
A hundred million may seem like a lot, but it also highlights how incredibly dominant the .com TLD is. As of this writing there are almost 104 million registered .com domain names, more than all ccTLDs combined.
This should be seen as more of more a testament to the popularity of .com than any failure on part of ccTLDs.
To put these numbers in perspective, as of Q1 2012 there were a total of 233 million domain names across all TLDs (gTLDs and ccTLDs). So .com has north of 40% of all domain names on the entire Internet.
.com compared with other gTLDs
As you can imagine, .com dominates the generic top-level domains (gTLDs) even more, where it accounts for 74% of all registered domain names. It has seven times as many domain names as .net, the second-largest gTLD.
The number of registered domain names per gTLD are currently as follows:
- .com 103.9 million
- .net 14.7 million
- .org 10.0 million
- .info 7.8 million
- .biz 2.3 million
(There are more gTLDs, we only listed the five largest.)
Will the .com dominance continue?
The question is what will happen with .com now that ICANN has opened the floodgates for hundreds or even thousands of new TLDs.
Even though this has opened up for a more, shall we way, diverse TLD field, Internet users could very well be so used to seeing the .com suffix by now that its dominant position is assured for many years to come.
Data sources: Verisign for Q1 numbers, Registrar Stats for current gTLD numbers.
Crown in top right image via Shutterstock.
